nuclear-news

On Nov. 1, the S.C. Public Service Commission (PSC) will start a hearing that will impact the electric rates of SCE&G customers for decades.

The primary issue to be decided is how much if anything SCE&G customers will be forced to pay for the incurred construction costs of its abandoned nuclear project in Fairfield County.

Essentially, this is a regulatory trial.

SCE&G is being accused of intentionally withholding critical information from the S.C. Office of Regulatory Staff (ORS) and the PSC.

ORS is the state agency that was responsible for analyzing data received from SCE&G for the approval of construction cost increases, construction schedule delays and rate hike requests to pay for construction cost financing. ORS then made recommendations to the PSC for decisions on these matters.

After reviewing more than a million pages of SCE&G-produced documents, ORS concluded that by March 2015, the company knew that it would take several years longer to complete the nuclear project and the cost would be billions higher than it was telling the regulators.

By not providing this information to ORS and the PSC, critics contend that SCE&G enabled itself to obtain undeserved electric rate increases to fund the doomed project.

The principle SCE&G challengers — ORS, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth — maintain that had ORS and the PSC known what SCE&G knew in March 2015, the regulators might have pulled the plug on the project then, saving the ratepayers billions……….https://www.thestate.com/opinion/op-ed/article220308855.html